Colter

Rick Bass

Description

A prize-winning Montana writer’s tribute to “a brilliant and mischievous chocolate brown pointer that will transfix anyone who has ever loved a dog” (Publishers Weekly).
 
Colter pairs one of America’s most treasured writers with our most treasured “best friend.” Colter, a German shorthair pup, was the runt of the litter, and Rick Bass took him only because nobody else would. Soon, though, Colter surprised his new owner, first with his raging genius, then with his innocent ability to lead Bass to new territory altogether, a place where he felt instantly more alive and more connected to the world. Distinguished by “crystalline, see-through-to-the-bottom prose,” this interspecies love story vividly captures the essence of canine companionship, and yet, as we’ve come to expect from Bass, it does far more (Rocky Mountain News). “With an elegant, often erudite flavor to this story,” Colter illuminates the heart of life by recreating the sheer, unmitigated pleasure of an afternoon in the Montana hills with a loyal pup bounding at your side (BookPage).

Sujets

• Nature
• Trail
• Boulder
• Canine
• Camping
• Solitude
• Bird
• Tracking
• Shoot
• Woods
• Earth
• Valley
• Wilderness
• Woodland
• Field
• Trees
• Animals
• Environmentalist
• Pet
• Shooting
• Fishing
• Environment
• Plains
• Wildlife
• Hiking
• Pet adoption
• Conservationist
• Pointing breed
• Outdoors
• Roughing It
• FOREST
• Puppy
• WEST
• Western world
• Sense

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9780547526362
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Copyright © 2000 by Rick Bass
 
All rights reserved
 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
 
www.hmhbooks.com
 
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Bass, Rick, date Colter : the true story of the best dog I ever had / Rick Bass, p cm. ISBN 0-395-92618-1 1. Hunting dogs—Montana—Yaak Valley—Anecdotes. 2. Dog owners—Montana—Yaak Valley—Anecdotes. 3. Human-animal relationships—Montana—Yaak Valley—Anecdotes. 4 Bass, Rick, 1958– I. Title. SF 428.5 . B 336 2000 636.752'09786'81—dc21 00-020524
 
e ISBN 978-0-547-52636-2 v2.0713
 
 
 
 
For John Graves and wild birds, and for Elizabeth, Mary Katherine, and Lowry
Prologue
I ’D SEE my friend Tom walking up and down the roads, dressed in buckskin made from the deer hide he and his wife, Nancy, had tanned, with a hawk on one arm and a beautiful brown dog, whose name I learned later was Paggon, running along in front of him. I knew Tom was hunting grouse, and I’d wave and drive on, never imagining the changes that were soon to come. The aspen and cottonwood trees were stripped bare, as were the limbs of the alder, and smoke was rising from the chimneys of the cabins along the river as the valley tucked itself in for winter.
 
Paggon’s pups were born in May. I never saw the litter. I didn’t know Tom and Nancy had been selling them, one by one, through May and June.
That June I was out in my little shed, writing, when I heard a truck pull in the drive. It was Nancy, seemingly aswarm with dogs: three brown heads like dolls in the front seat with her—Paggon and two gangly pups swarming her, licking her. As I stepped out of the shed Paggon leapt out, the pups tumbling out after her—one stocky and bullish, the other bony, cross-legged, pointy-headed, goofy-looking. The goofy one ran toward me, barking and growling and leaping up at me. I put my arms out and caught him. Nancy told me Paggon had had a litter in May, and the one I was holding was the last one left; the stocky one, Bridger, being already spoken for. She claimed she had come by only to borrow a cup of sugar, but before she left I had written her a check for that last pup, the runt of the litter, the one nobody else wanted. Something about the goofy little knot-headed dog made me laugh.
How we fall into grace. You can’t work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.
 
The first photograph I have of Colter shows our then two-year-old, Mary Katherine, burying him in aspen leaves, piling handful after handful of them on him while he lies there patiently, with gold leaves like coins against his rich deep brown coat.
 
My hunting partner, Tim, had a reserved and elegant, even queenly, golden retriever, Maddie. She came from pet lines, not hunting lines, but he had trained her to hunt simply by having such good communication with her, by showing her, explaining to her in that unspoken language of dog and man, what he wanted her to do. Sculpting her with his passion: shaping and bending her through yes’s and no’s, smiles and reprimands, laughs and smiles. It was an amazing thing to see. Her job as a flushing dog was to gallop through the woods, find the spooky grouse, and pursue them until their only chance was to leap into the air and try to fly away fast. At which time Tim had one, maybe two, seconds to take a shot.
Colter’s role was the opposite of Maddie’s. His breeding, his blood—the earth and history—called for him not to flush the birds, but to set up on point as close as he could get to a bird without frightening it.
Every bird-dog trainer in the world will tell you not to run a pointing dog and a flushing dog together. The pointing dog will begin to enjoy flushing the birds, and the flushing dog might begin to lose its natural ability to get the bird into the air at close distance to the hunter.
And maybe they’re right. Maybe this was the one time, the only time, in the history of dogs that it ever worked. But these two dogs, an old female and a young male, were just friendly enough and competitive enough to challenge each other to perform at a higher level—as if each, in a kind of stubbornness, sought to convert the other to his or her way of being-in-the-world through the force of luminous example.
It might have been a cardinal sin, but damn it was fun. Occasionally they would look back over their shoulders at each other, and sometimes at us, but usually they were pushing wildly forward, surging, always forward; and the world, the fields around us, crackled, doubly rich with two kinds of energy, those two styles of hunting at once.
It revved the dogs up, as well as us. The word addiction has such a negative ring to it; I suppose I should say that we were more fully engaged when hunting with them; more intimately connected to the natural world. But an addiction is what it was.
They moved through the dense woods of this dark valley and across the gold prairies of the east side, so fast that you could have sworn the color of electricity was not blue or silver, but instead brown, Colter, and gold, Maddie.
We didn’t know what we were doing: only that we couldn’t do without it.
Colter was born wild, born ready. In that sense he was irreducible. All the rest of his training would involve a paring-down from that initial and innate fullness, rather than a building-up. Out of such gradual reduction, his force, his excellence, was magnified.
There was, however, no whittling down, that first year. Tim and I, not knowing any better, just laughed, and let him run wilder, bigger, following the siren odors of scent into the next county, or the next state—which, with his incredible nose, he could miraculously detect.
On our first trip across the Continental Divide, over to the east side of Montana, to hunt pheasants, Tim and I were curious as to how the dogs would react to a species they had never hunted before. The pheasants tended to run great distances, we knew, at high speeds, so that neither would they flush for a flushing dog nor hold tight for a pointing dog.
It was early December, wicked-cold and windy. We drove the six hard hours through the snowy mountains and came out onto the plains with still about an hour of light left in the day. The Rocky Mountains, majestic beneath the day’s new snow, loomed behind us now. It was strange and beautiful, looking at them from a slight distance—from the other side—rather than being immersed deep within them.
We knocked on a farmer’s door; got permission to hunt, got directions. We drove to the field and put on our gear, loaded our guns, and stepped out into the north wind: its forty-mile-per-hour gusts.
The dogs never looked back. They leapt from the back of the truck and ran barking to the north, running neck and neck, faster than I would have believed dogs could run, straight into the headwind.
From time to time they would make the faintest, slightest adjustment in their beeline, as if the pheasant they were running had altered its course left or right by a foot or two—but for the most part it was as if they were following a line straight as railroad tracks, and they ran north into the blue dusk and over the horizon, barking joyously. In two minutes they were a mile distant; in five minutes, we could not see them. Tim and I hiked north into the bitter wind—we’d forgotten to bring gloves, so we unloaded our guns and walked with our hands tucked under our armpits, arms crossed, as if imitating the winged walk of some awkward birds—and we talked and shivered. The dogs returned to us shortly after dark, and that was our first pheasant hunt. Nothing.
 
There was to be only one really perfect point that season, that whole year. It was back in our valley, right before dark, and Tim and I were driving home from an afternoon’s hunt, birdless again. Tim spotted a lone mature ruffed grouse back in the woods—giant larch trees all around—and we stopped and turned out Colter to see what he would do. I stepped into the woods and loaded my gun.
Colter picked up the scent where the bird had crossed the road, and then, rather than ground-trailing it to the source, he instinctively lifted his head high and moved straight in to the scent’s origin—ignoring, rejecting immediately, the residue, the leavings.
He approached the bird, then slammed on point as if piling into a brick wall. I stepped up and flushed the bird. It flew fast and low between the big trees, a dark blur in dim light. I almost waited too long. I finally poked a shot at it and the bird tumbled. Colter, who was still on point, went on my command to fetch the bird. He brought it all the way in to me, eager in his puppyness to please. (After adolescence—or, as Nancy puts it, “after his beans dropped”—he stopped retrieving birds, as if conce